I thank the Members staying for my Adjournment debate this evening at the early hour of 11 pm.

For those of us who like to be clear about definitions, I should start by making it clear that my Adjournment debate today is on intensive farming operations in the United Kingdom. I say this because concentrated animal feeding operations has a legal definition that is used in the United States but is also relevant to this debate. In the United States, concentrated animal feeding operations describe farms over a certain size that farm animals in extreme confinement. We do not have an equivalent definition in the United Kingdom, but we do have intensive farming of animals, which is defined by the Environment Agency as a farm housing at least 40,000 birds or 2,000 pigs. This form of intensive farming has increased in the UK by a quarter in the six years running up to 2017.

As reported in The Guardian newspaper, a recent investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that we now have a large number of intensive farming operations in the UK, many of which would meet the definition of concentrated animal feeding operations used in the United States. These so called megafarms have at least 125,000 birds for meat, or 82,000 birds for eggs, 2,500 pigs, 700 dairy cattle or 1,000 beef cattle. We now have 789 megafarms in the UK, according to that investigation.